Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Paradise of the Blind, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Traditional Values and Sacrifice
Communism, Hypocrisy, and Corruption
Love and Wealth
Beauty, Disillusionment, and Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
Que tells Hang the story of Ton. After her parents pass away, Que lives alone for a year. She feeds herself meagerly: a hard-boiled egg or a clear soup. At night, she listens to the neighbors cooking for their loved ones, while she is intensely lonely. She prays to her ancestors, imploring them to protect her.
Here Duong introduces the idea that food can be expressions of love. Other people have families to care for and meals to cook, and yet Que has very little. She has no one whom she can care for nor who can express their love to her.
Themes
During this year, Que meets Ton, a schoolteacher who had just been posted to the village. Their courtship begins quickly, much to the disapproval of fellow villagers. According to tradition, Que should have observed a three year mourning period following the death of her parents. Que and Ton are called “shameless” and “degenerates,” and it is predicted that they would have deep misfortune. Still, Hang can tell, listening to the story, that her mother truly loved Ton.
This is another way in which adhering to traditional values can come at the expense of personal happiness. Despite the fact that Que and Ton truly love each other, the fact that they do not conform to the expectations of the village serves as a potential threat to their happiness as they are criticized by the other villagers.
Themes
A little over a year after the wedding (still long before Hang’s birth), peace is declared and the French withdraw from Vietnam. The soldiers start to return, and some soldiers tell Que that her brother Chinh had been very sick and didn’t have enough clothing. Que is consumed by worry. Six months after liberation, Uncle Chinh arrives home.
Though Duong doesn’t go in-depth on the politics of the war, it was Ho Chi Minh’s leadership (under communist ideology) that garnered support and ultimately led to Vietnam’s liberation from France. The support for the Communist Party of Vietnam carries through the book, even though Duong illustrates the problems with the communist government.
Themes
When Uncle Chinh arrives, Ton gives him and Que privacy and visits his mother, Nhieu’s, house—they live in the same village. Nhieu is ill and lives with Ton’s eldest sister, Tam. Because Tam is educated and closed-off, she hasn’t been able to find a husband. Instead, she works in the rice paddies and raises silkworms.
Here Duong highlights the hard work that Aunt Tam puts in to take care of her mother, brother, and the family’s farm. Ultimately this land will prove to be the family’s downfall due to the land reform, and it is Aunt Tam’s incredible hard work to regain her wealth that illustrates some of the backwardness of the Party’s ideologies and reforms.
Themes
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As soon as Ton leaves, Uncle Chinh tells Que that she must no longer speak or have any contact with Ton because he is an “exploiter.” Uncle Chinh explains that Ton’s entire family are landlords, who are bitter enemies of the peasant class. He says that the Party is about to begin land reform, and that Ton’s family are the people whom they must condemn and punish. When Que protests that Ton’s family has never exploited anyone, Uncle Chinh tells her not to betray her own class. Que starts to sob.
Uncle Chinh is the most vocal supporter of the Communist Party that is featured in the book. Both here and throughout the book, Duong highlights the radical and almost dystopian language of the Communist Party. But while the language implies a kind of hardline stance, this only adds to the irony later when so many of the officials (Uncle Chinh included) prove their words to be hollow.
Themes
Que is confused, thinking that Nhieu only has a few acres of rice paddy, which Tam cultivates and hires a few people to help her. Que thinks that villagers who owned a bit of land were the backbone of the countryside: farmers who were always incredibly devoted to what they do.
Que points out that Ton’s family has never exploited anyone; they are simply being targeted for owning land. Rather than equalizing hardworking citizens, the reforms punish some of the most productive members of society.
Themes
Uncle Chinh immediately goes after Nhieu and Tam. The two women are forced to prostrate themselves with their arms behind their backs in the village courtyard. People around them shout “down with the landowning classes!” Other “exploiters,” who own just a bit of land, are also forced into this humiliation. The villagers who denounce Nhieu and Tam simply do so out of fear.
The fact that the other peasants, many of whom know and love Nhieu and Tam, feel that they have no option but to denounce the women highlights another issue with the reforms. Duong emphasizes how these reforms cause fear in the very people they are supposed to be uplifting and protecting.
Themes
Two peasants who had been made “pillars of the land reform” lead the accusations against Nhieu and Tam. One, named Bich, was expelled from the army for drunkenness and is notorious for his laziness and his lecherousness. Now, suddenly, he had become a respected figure preaching “class-consciousness” and the struggle against the “exploitative property-owning classes.” The second peasant is a widow named Nan, who stole food to the point where she gave her husband a heart attack over her behavior. After he died, she was incapable of working and ran out of money.
The two people who are given authority in the land reforms begin to hint at the hypocrisy of the Party. Bich is not a person who has been exploited—he is notorious for being lazy. But simply by taking up the Party ideology and echoing their hollow words, he is given power and property. Nan, too, was simply lazy and had also stolen from others, and yet she is elevated above others simply because she is willing to commit to the ideology.
Themes
Now, Bich and Nan, the two outcasts, sit on the “bench of honor,” scolding villagers like Nhieu and Tam. During a second denunciation session, Nhieu and Tam are forced to squat in a deep pit. They feel humiliated and helpless. Afterward, Nhieu falls ill and dies. Before this, Uncle Chinh had told Ton that he and Que were no longer husband and wife, and that if he tried to see Que, Uncle Chinh would have him locked up. When Ton reports this to Tam, she tells him to flee so that he can avoid the same humiliation, and he does.
Rather than equalizing citizens and promoting harmony, instead the land reforms propagate more injustice and lead to Nhieu’s death. Additionally, Duong highlights one of the differences between Que and Uncle Chinh and the degree to which women are more strictly held to the standards of traditional values than men are. Whereas Que views it as her duty to support her brother no matter what, Uncle Chinh is not held to those same values and instead prioritizes the Communist Party.
Themes
After Ton departs, Que secretly visits Tam to ask where Ton went. Tam tells Que that she does not know. Later, Uncle Chinh interrogates Que, saying that he was informed that she met with “that bitch Tam.” He tells Que that he has been promoted to chief of the village Land Reform Section, and that if she continues to meet with Tam, the Party will denounce him. He tells her not to be selfish and to think of the interests of their class. Que sobs and wanders around the house, distraught.
Again, the hollowness of Uncle Chinh’s words ring out here. He tells Que not to be selfish, but he has persecuted her husband and torn their family apart. This dynamic is emblematic of the chaos and the destructiveness of the land reform, as it turns family members against one another and punishes innocent citizens like Ton.
Themes
Que soon begins to deteriorate physically and mentally, and Uncle Chinh confronts her again to stop grieving Ton. He tells her that she is undermining his efforts in the Party, and that she has to support him because they only have each other. Instead, that night, Que bundles up clothes and leaves the village. No one can find her. Six months later, Uncle Chinh leaves the village to join the Land Reform Section—then one day, Que returns. She is emaciated, her face covered in lines.
Again, the irony of Uncle Chinh’s words becomes apparent here. Uncle Chinh believes that Que must support him because they have to prioritize family over everything else, but he has not done the same for her. Duong also highlights how the suffering that Que has endured has aged her and detracted from her beauty.
Themes
Soon after Que returns to the village, the “Rectification of Errors” begins. The campaign is an effort to rectify the land reform, which had wrought immense chaos and suffering. People talk about the injustices they suffered, and Uncle Chinh becomes reviled through the village. No one knows where he has gone, and so a mob of villagers appear on Que’s doorstep. However, Aunt Tam intervenes, telling them that Que had lost her husband at the hands of her brother and does not deserve punishment. The mob disperses, and Que opens the door and embraces Tam.
The ineffectiveness of the Party’s policies become so apparent that even they admit their failings. Yet the destruction and pain that they wrought—like driving Ton away, or causing Nhieu’s death—are irreversible. This moment of solidarity between the two women provides a potential alternative for the idea that family must come before everyone else.
Themes
In the present day, on the train to Moscow, Hang watches the countryside pass. An old man next to her (whom she calls her traveling companion) offers her a sandwich, but she declines. He puts on music, and Hang thinks about the first time she heard the artist whose music is playing. The story flashes back: Hang and a friend, who are both “exported workers” in Russia, visit her friend’s uncle in Kiev. They start to cook food, and Hang’s friend leaves for a short errand.
Hang’s journey to Moscow takes on a new meaning following the revelations about her uncle and her mother’s history. Even though Uncle Chinh so thoroughly damaged Hang’s parents’ lives, she is still choosing to visit him because he is ill. This demonstrates how Hang is making the same decision her mother made: to prioritize family over all else.
Themes
While Hang’s friend is gone, she continues preparing their meal with her friend’s uncle. Three hours pass, and they start to eat. He suggests that they share wine as well. Hang replies that she can’t drink alcohol, but he tells her that the wine is “very light” and pushes it to her lips. Out of politeness, she drinks the glass. Suddenly, he starts grabbing at Hang to kiss her, but she pulls away, warning him that she’s going to scream. She pushes his head back and gives him a hard stare.
This story expands on some of the traditional values outside of deference to family that is inherent in Vietnamese culture. Hang feels that she has to respect an older man, despite the fact that she can’t drink. But this episode demonstrates the potential harm in those values: because this man simply wants to take advantage of her, being deferent to him only allows him a greater advantage.
Themes
Suddenly, Hang’s friend returns, and she tells her uncle that he should be ashamed. She tells him to sleep next door, and he leaves. Hang is humiliated, sad, and homesick. Her friend puts on the Russian singer, singing about mountain ranges and dense forests. Hang thinks that this singer must have also known weariness and despair, and that she must have had to reinvent a sense of optimism for herself. She thinks that life is like a flower picked from a swamp. Back in the train, Hang thinks that the voice had so enchanted her because it beckoned her “to revolt.”
Here, Duong introduces the symbol of the duckweed flower. Hang recognizes the beauty of the flower in her childhood, but now that she has grown up, also sees the poverty and hardships that have been masked by that beauty. It follows that she ties this metaphor to her desire to “revolt,” because seeing the stagnation in her home country prompts her to avoid her mother’s path and to turn away from her family.
Themes
